without friends and hated by everyone, most of all himself.
“That wasn’t so hard, was it?”
“No sir.”
“It ain’t my business, but a young fellow like you shouldn’t be cooped up in a nowhere place like this. And those guys, Baptists or not, are right about how shitty Lester’s store is.”
“Yes sir,” said the boy. “I know that.”
“Can’t you get a better job?”
“No sir. Can’t seem to get my letters straight. Didn’t do well in school, quit after two years. Don’t test out good enough to get into the service. Like to be in the Air Force, work on planes. Love planes. But can’t pass the tests. Lester’s only fella that would have me. I think he knew my daddy.”
“Maybe you got something wrong with your eyes or some little deal in your brain makes you see the letters in the wrong order. There is such a thing, you know. You should look into it.”
“Yes sir,” said the fellow.
“You should get yourself tested.”
“Yes sir.”
“Well, I can tell from the way you say it you don’t mean a word of it. Son, don’t give up. Take some free advice from an old goat with a limp who’s been around a block or two in his time on earth. Some social service deal in town or off in Bristol or wherever will test you for free and if you have a thing wrong, come up with a way to fix it up. Give it a try. You don’t need to do this shit forever.”
The boy looked at him from darkest abject misery, then smiled. It seemed nobody had ever talked to him like a human being before. The smile showed surprisingly good teeth and maybe a little brainpower in the eyes.
“I will look into it,” he said.
“Thatta boy,” said Bob.
“By the way, that Baptist place got to be the old Pioneer Children’s Camp, where I think a man hung himself when they caught him diddling little children back some years. I heard someone rented and moved in. It’s four miles up on the left, black metal gate, locked all the time. They painted it over so the black is shiny but I don’t think they changed the Pioneer sign.”
“You do know a thing or two,” said Bob.
Bob got there soon enough, and it was as the fellow had said, the gate was newly painted though the sign that read PIONEER CHILDREN’S CAMP was still shabby with age. A dirt road led off into the forest, disappearing as it wound through the dense trees in a few yards. The gate was still sticky in the August heat and it seemed a lot of bugs had landed and found their fate to be paralyzation in the thick goop someone had slopped all over. Bob looked for a way in, thought it wrong to just climb over the gate, and then saw a ’70s-style intercom relay on the gatepost.
He pushed the sci-fi plastic Speak button.
“Hello there.”
Through a rattley smear of electricity the answer was nothing more than a “Can I help you?”
“Name’s Swagger,” he said. “My daughter was the one nearly killed in an accident on 421 on Iron Mountain out of town last week. I’m looking into the circumstances and have information suggesting she stopped off here. Was wondering if I could talk about it to someone, the bossman I guess.”
The cackly soup recommenced to jabber from the speaker and Bob thought he heard a “Certainly.” A clunk of some sort announced that the lock had been sprung from afar, so he opened the gate, drove through, then closed it behind him. The road twisted through trees, then between a couple of foothills, and came finally to an open valley behind elevations that formed obstacles that were green and high but somewhere between hills and mountains. Maybe what eastern people would call mountains, but certainly not what a westerner would so label.
He saw a small, white chapel standing alone; a barn; a kind of exercise yard of pounded dirt; a schoolbus, yellow in the sun; a dormitory, and a kind of gymnasium, all of the buildings constructed with sturdy tin, tin-roofed, and a little shiny. Ballfields, basketball courts, and the crater of an old and unfilled swimming pool also used up the open space until the forest took over again, and shortly thereafter, the mountains began their skyward inclination.
He parked next to the bus in a parking lot where a lot of vehicular traffic had worn a lot of grooves. But no other machines were in sight, and as he closed his door, he looked up to see an old buzzard in some kind of powder-blue three-piece suit approaching, a cross between Colonel Sanders and Jimmy Carter, with the former’s corn-pone stylings and the latter’s hidden hardness of spirit.
“Mr. Swagger, Mr. Swagger, we are so sad about your girl,” said the man, rushing urgently to him, laying a little too much courtly southern-style bullshit on him.
Bob stretched out a hand, felt a grip stronger than you might expect, saw blue, deep eyes, pink skin; smelled cologne, saw white fake teeth and a bristle of a genteel mustache, as the older fellow announced himself to be one Reverend Alton Grumley of the New Freedom Baptist Church, Hot Springs County, Arkansas. He was up here with a constituency of young men who wanted quiet and solitude to pursue their Bible studies. The Reverend had waves of moussed hair-possibly real but almost certainly not his own by birth-and the pinkness of the overscrubbed. He told Bob that he was welcome to stay as long as he wanted and the Reverend would answer any question.
“Sir, thanks for the time.”
“Come on in, set a spell. I’ll answer any question I can to put your mind at ease. Oh, the poor dear. That’s sad, and a parent’s pain is sad as well.”
The buzzard, fretting about Nikki, led Bob to a porch that overlooked the athletic fields, and in time a well- prepared young man in a white shirt and dark trousers came out with a pitcher of iced tea, and the two men sat talking and sipping.
“She was such a nice young lady,” said the Reverend Grumley.
“My first child,” said Bob, “so you can see my concern.”
“How is the dear girl?”
“She shows signs every day of improvement. Yet she’s still in that coma. They say she could come out at any moment, or never.”
“Don’t mean to give you worries, but have you thought of moving her from Bristol? To a bigger city with more sophisticated hospitals?”
“Actually, I already did that. She’s in Baltimore now, where they’ve got the best medicine in the world.”
“I see,” said the Reverend.
“Yes sir, the world famous Johns Hopkins.”
“I have heard of it,” said the Reverend. “I’m happy she’ll have the best care. She’s fortunate to have a father who has resources.”
“The horses have been kind to me. I own a series of lay-up barns across the West, where they take their horses seriously. What’s the money for, though, if not your own children?”
“True enough. Now the police say it was some unruly young man trying to be a NASCAR star that caused the accident, at least according to the paper. Is that the accepted version?”
“It is and I have no cause to doubt it. Still, I want this boy caught, so he won’t do the same again to another man’s daughter. Now the sheriff’s department in this little county is all stretched thin because they’ve got to provide a detail for the big race, that plus Sheriff Wells’s helicopter raids on the meth labs that you’ve read so much about, which seems to be his obsession at the expense of other duties, so I worry this issue may have slid to the back burner. I am poking about to see if there’s any need to hire a private investigator.”
“Tell me how I can help you.”
Bob said he was reconstructing that last day and was curious as to why she had come out here, given the fact a Baptist prayer camp didn’t seem the sort of place to conceal a methamphetamine lab, which was the original intent of her assignment.
“She was just doing her job,” the old fellow said. “She’d evidently heard reports of gunfire from out here and made a connection between guns and criminals and drug lab security, that sort of thing. But I explained to her… here, come with me, Mr. Swagger. Let me set your mind at rest.”
They walked across the yard, then the field, and came at last to a small structure, a kind of open hut. Bob looked inside and saw a robotic-looking electric device that was like something out of an old black and white
